The Cuban Revolution, the American civil rights movement, and the student New Left of the sixties all shared historic similarities and bonds. They were not precisely new, though each appeared out of nowhere.
The Cuban Revolution rested on a continuous history traceable back to José Martí’s generation of the mid 1800s. Both the territories of what would become Cuba and the United States were “discovered,” invaded, and disrupted by Spanish conquerors. In both, indigenous tribes fought the invaders and died in great numbers. In both, slave revolts—either by indigenous people or Africans—began in the 1500s. Cuba was a desirable target for American “annexation” from the time of Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. “[Cuba is] the most interesting addition that can be made to our system of states,” Jefferson once wrote.1 Nationalist revolutionaries like Martí took exile from Spanish tyranny in New York and Florida, where they plotted their second war of independence, which started in 1895. Martí’s generation was also that of W.E.B. Dubois, the leading African American revolutionary, author, academic, Marxist, and a founder of the NAACP. Martí wrote extensively about the United States for Latin American newspapers, and never doubted the US imperial goal of pretending to befriend the Cubans in order to supplant the Spanish on the island. In his final and long-remembered letter, Martí wrote that his goal was “to prevent, by [achieving] the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with that added weight, upon other lands of our America . . . I have lived inside the monster and know its entrails; my sling is David’s.”2 He died the next day, May 19, 1895, while fighting in Cuba, sealing his role as father of his country. True to Martí’s prophecy, the United States joined the Spanish–American War, known in Cuba as the second war of independence, and emerged from the 1898 Treaty of Paris in control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. Gen. Leonard Wood, fresh from pacification wars against Native Americans, became Cuba’s military governor, and the 1901 Platt Amendment eliminated Cuban sovereignty, setting the stage for continuous civil rights and national liberation struggles until the 1959 revolution.3
RICARDO: If you go in depth into Fidel’s thinking, writing, and life, he didn’t come out of the blue. He studied the Cuban revolutionary experience from 1868, the whole experience against Spain. That started in eastern Cuba. At that time, in eastern Cuba you had less slavery; it was the only place on the island with a number of black small farmers. Cespedes and his group, the Masons, didn’t talk about socialism but about the exploitation of man by man.4 They had to face the strong-hold of Spanish domination, which was in western Cuba. Cespedes’s idea in the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878) was to invade western Cuba. What was the dream of Maceo and Gómez? Also to go and invade western Cuba. Maceo said, “Now I have to raise the torch.” “Bless the torch,” he once said. They wanted to burn down the sugar plantations. Some thought it was too radical or extreme to try to win a war against Spain because they didn’t have support from the aristocracy.5 Then when [General Máximo] Gómez reached Las Villas [a province immediately to the east of Havana] in the 1895–1898 war and saw the misery of a slaves, he too said, “Bendita sea la tea,” more or less, “God bless the torch.”6 Others like Mella planned on going to Mexico and from there invading Cuba. The secret police killed him there.
So Fidel knew very well what he was doing when he went to Mexico and invaded Cuba from there. His idea in the Sierra was to invade western Cuba as others had planned before. What happened in the Sierra Maestra was the fruit of that long history. It was not about a bunch of people just going to the mountains to start a war.
The Cuban Revolution unfolded while I was a student journalist in Ann Arbor. I remember being touched in an indefinable way by those guerrillas with beards. I was then preoccupied with convincing candidate John F. Kennedy to endorse a Peace Corps proposal. Before my eyes, Kennedy did so on a rain-swept Ann Arbor night, at 2:00 a.m., October 14, 1960. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to quite understand that this Peace Corps was an American answer to the perceived threat of the bearded Cubans in Latin America, nor that it was the “soft power” cousin of the Green Berets being prepared for foreign jungles. The Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961, coming so swiftly after Kennedy’s inauguration, profoundly rattled my political consciousness by introducing the reality of a “deep state” where secrets were held from the voting public—and the media, my chosen profession—by a CIA-led elite of the “best and brightest,” often with disastrous results. I had no idea at the time that the same CIA covertly funded the National Student Association, whose annual student conventions I attended in 1960 and 1961, and where Cuba was one of the hottest topics of controversy.
RICARDO: During the Bay of Pigs I was at the university as vice president of FEU, and involved in defense preparations. Raúl Roa7 was in New York where he spent several days, maybe even weeks, denouncing the invasion at the UN. I was involved in the defense of the university area. Every building around the hill, including the Calixto García Hospital. Cubans were organized everywhere to protect their factories, neighborhoods, schools, etc. So we were at the University, all the students, workers, professors under the command of the FEU. We were called the Milicia Universitaria [University Militia]. In those days we were expecting an air attack or an invasion, and we were on guard watching our buildings and patrolling our area. We did not have to fight. In the end, Fidel called me to have a special broadcast on a “Universidad Popular” program. It was a Sunday TV program which I and a group of friends from the 26th, the Directorio, and the PSP ran in those years. On the program Fidel gave a long and detailed explanation of the battle that had just ended.
The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) led the ranks of the student Right, as their cadre would continue to do for decades to come. Since the Cuban invasion was the brainchild of the CIA, the cry to “Free Cuba” aroused the YAF contingent and most student conservatives, nearly all of whom were appalled by beards—their hero Sen. Barry Goldwater disparaged Fidel as “a bum without a shave.”8 The same student activists were galvanized to resist any desegregation of lunch counters in the South, on the grounds that restaurant owners had inviolable rights to refuse service to anyone they chose. The senior voice of YAF in those years was the late William F. Buckley Jr., a former CIA agent on whose lavish Connecticut estate YAF had been founded. His magazine, the National Review, was editorializing in support of segregation at the time. The argument that Cubans should be freed from their own revolution, but not young black students from barriers to voting, eating, or riding on buses, was a contradiction few could abide. Had I known that the CIA was funding both the Cuban exiles and the National Student Association, that news would have shocked away all that remained of my twenty-one-year-old innocence. I wasn’t old enough to vote for JFK but would gladly have done so. At the 1960 National Student Association convention I fought against the YAF proposal to liberate Cuba, not realizing that the policy was already being implemented in secret.
Ricardo was recruited by Raúl Roa to the new Cuban foreign ministry, to handle Latin American relations, at the age of twenty-four, becoming one of the youngest diplomats in the world. It was one month before the Cuban missile crisis.
Occurring shortly after the Port Huron Statement was issued in October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis fulfilled our worst nightmares and left a permanent generational scar. I personally was never more traumatized in my life, before or after those October days. The CIA was already running covert sabotage attacks and assassination efforts in Cuba, through a secret program code-named “Mongoose,” with the ultimate aim of regime change. When they detected the shipment of Soviet missiles, the Kennedy brothers and their advisers secretly considered scenarios that accepted nuclear war as one possible outcome. They at least believed that the threat of a nuclear war was necessary to end the crisis. To be “credible,” of course, it had to seem likely to an adversary that the threat was more than a bluff, that is, that nuclear weapons would be used as a last resort. In retrospect, JFK mused that the chances of Russia going “all the way” to war were “somewhere between one out of three and even.”9 Kennedy’s military advisers urged bombing the missile sites, following up with a land invasion of Cuba and, if “necessary,” an attack on the Soviet Union using nuclear-armed missiles. This kind of thinking, called “crackpot realism” by C. Wright Mills, was later sensationalized in Stanley Kubrick’s film, Dr. Strangelove, partly based on the character of Kennedy’s air force secretary, Gen. Curtis LeMay. The growing Cuban-Soviet alliance was seen not only as a geo-political threat to the Cold War power balance, not only as a violation of America’s unilaterally declared Monroe Doctrine of 1823, but also as a threat aggravated by certain primordial feelings on the part of the United States that Cuba was destined to be ours. The Soviet Union’s intrusion into our hemisphere by putting the missiles in Cuba represented the first time a European military power had intervened in Latin America since Napoleon III invaded Mexico in 1861.
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, for his part, covertly shipped nuclear-tipped medium-range missiles to Cuba “in view of the threats of aggressive imperialist quarters,” with Cuba’s consent.10 Over forty thousand Soviet troops were to be stationed in Cuba as well. Later it became known that the nuclear-tipped missiles were under the full control of the Soviets, not the Cubans, and therefore could be used or with-drawn by the Soviets at their sole discretion. Khrushchev apparently believed that this escalation would deter another US invasion and prevent, rather than provoke, a wider war. In his mind, if the Soviets could accept American nuclear warheads on the borders of the Soviet sphere of influence, for example in Turkey, then the United States could be forced into a similar position in the Western Hemisphere. The Soviet Union’s stature as a protector of socialism and third world revolution would be powerfully enhanced, offsetting competition from China.
Revolutionary Cuba’s position was that it had a sovereign right to defend itself against outside aggression with any kind of weapons under a deterrence umbrella. According to Gott, the idea of nuclear missiles was not at first a Cuban one.11 “The [Soviet] desire to achieve a more equal balance of strategic nuclear forces with the United States may well have been of paramount consideration.” The Cubans went along, however, despite questions about how the installation could be kept secret, and the loss of Cuban control of the weapons. As “the worst fears of the Cubans were being realized,”12 Fidel gave an incendiary speech, which sounds today as if taped from another world, proclaiming a revolutionary willingness to face total annihilation if the war broke out: “We have the consolation of knowing that in a thermonuclear war, the aggressors, those who unleash a thermonuclear war, will be exterminated.”13 Che was penning similar sentiments which were published posthumously: “What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims”; and he saw the Cuban people advancing fearlessly “toward the hecatomb which signifies final redemption.”14 In Cuban lore, Fidel’s speech became their second Baraguá, recalling the 1878 defiant refusal by Antonio Maceo to sign a temporary cease-fire with Spain without achieving either independence or the full liberation of the slaves.15
In 1962, however, the question was broader than another insult to Cuban’s sovereignty: the lives of hundreds of millions of people were at stake. As Kennedy noted, the range of the Soviet ICBM stretched from Hudson Bay, Canada, to Lima, Peru.16
Fidel and the revolution’s leadership were not consulted when the Soviets quietly negotiated the dismantling of their sites and the pullout of their missiles. The Cubans felt used as pawns. According to historian Thomas, “Castro was not consulted by Khrushchev and heard the news while talking with Guevara; he swore, kicked the wall, and broke a looking glass in his fury.”17
Decades later the world learned from Fidel that there had been forty-two medium-range missiles in Cuba, twenty with nuclear warheads and another twenty aboard a Soviet ship that was turned back. No missile launchers were yet operable, although two medium-range missiles were “ready to operate” by October 23.18 There were forty-three thousand Soviet troops on the island.19 “All the US nuclear and conventional forces throughout the world were now made ready for action, while a huge invasion force was massed in Florida.”20 Ninety B-52s with 25–50 megaton H-bombs were flying on Atlantic routes, while 150 ICBMs were on their launching pads.21 On the ocean to carry out the quarantine were sixteen US destroyers, three cruisers, and an antisubmarine aircraft carrier plus backup ships.22 JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen recalled that “our little group seated around the Cabinet table in continuous session that Saturday felt nuclear war to be closer on that day than at any time in the nuclear age.”23 When the crisis ebbed, Fidel called on the United States to end its subversion, lift the embargo, and cease air attacks and the occupation of Guantanamo. Cuba refused to allow outside inspectors to confirm the removal of the missiles, a decision Kennedy acquiesced in. The Americans significantly promised never to invade Cuba, although hit-and-run black operations continued along with the embargo. American missiles were later removed from Turkey in a reciprocal gesture. Cuba released 1,113 Bay of Pigs prisoners in exchange for $53 million in baby food and medicines.
When the crisis suddenly emerged into public view, those of us in the New Left were involved heavily in civil rights and university reform. Concerns about the Cold War and nuclear fallout were on the rise. We generally assumed that Kennedy could be deflected away from another Bay of Pigs, reach a rapprochement with Fidel, reverse the nuclear arms race with the Soviets, and navigate toward the “new era” of our dreams. But given the Bay of Pigs invasion and now the missile crisis, it was clear that there was at least a reflexive impulse toward imperial military intervention, even including the use of nuclear weapons, under the bland surface of national security thinking. In the Cold War thinking of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, there were only two alternatives: either a US “quick strike” against Cuba or a decision to “eliminate the Cuban problem by actually eliminating the island.”24 Our rising demands for a dramatic return to domestic priorities like civil rights seemed either threatening or a diversion from the global worldview in Washington. Fighting for freedom at the University of Mississippi was less “strategic” than introducing freedom at bayonet point in Havana or in South Vietnam. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) viewpoint of “making democracy safe for the world” was our challenge to the prevailing wisdom of Woodrow Wilson that the American mission was to make the world safe for democracy. The impulse toward military solutions was rising in 1962 toward Cuba and Vietnam, though we hardly noticed the creep until the missile crisis.
As for myself, I was wrong and naive in thinking that the only obstacle was the bitter Cuban exiles stranded in Florida, like the white segregationists in the Old South, an isolated, angry, “no surrender” minority that I believed would fade with time. But what I hadn’t figured on were the liberal, Ivy League-educated Democrats in the White House who shared the segregationists’ and YAF’s willingness to risk a nuclear holocaust rather than “surrender,” or at the least consider a nuclear bluff.
Such stubbornness was beyond my comprehension. Even while the Dixiecrats became the Republican Party, and later the Tea Party, a bipartisan combination of politicians still favored the embargo of Cuba, and perhaps another military adventure. Why was this? Revenge for Fidel’s repelling of the Bay of Pigs invasion? To enforce the Monroe Doctrine? To prevent the possible “export” of revolution to Latin America? To eradicate a socialist example “ninety miles from our shores”? Bertrand Russell issued an outcry to the world warning, “Within a week you will all be dead to please American madmen.”25 That said it all.
In Ann Arbor, I led an SDS protest of several hundred in response to the president’s frightening speech of October 22, 1962.26 At Harvard, an overflow crowd of over two thousand turned out; most of them, according to the SDS-affiliated journal Common Sense, were “more curious than partisan.”27 Thirty-five hundred turned out at the San Francisco Civic Center to hear Robert Scheer, Maurice Zeitlin, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Scheer’s call for UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson to resign in protest drew the loudest cheers of the day. In his speech, Scheer also said that Fidel had betrayed the revolution for the first time by accepting the Soviet nuclear missiles. Fistfights broke out and protestors were attacked by young Kennedy partisans at the universities of Indiana and Minnesota. Ten thousand turned out at New York’s UN Plaza on that Sunday, the day the crisis eased, bearing signs saying “We Oppose Bases and Blockades.” Membership in the Student Peace Movement, Women Strike for Peace, and the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy grew by the hour while these groups improvised the minimal organizational structure the rising numbers needed to express their shock.
Our SDS leadership in Ann Arbor plunged into overdrive, sending a flurry of mailings trying to dissect and explain how the unthinkable had come to pass. Almost spontaneously, thousands of students from around the country began driving, bussing or hitching rides to Washington, D.C., which was ground zero for the widely expected nuclear war. I personally had been inside the White House just weeks before, to present a fresh copy of the Port Huron Statement to the president’s in-house historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Now the White House, gleaming on the outside while curtained within, was the center of the “hecatomb” Che wrote about in his diaries. Yet we felt drawn to be there, to protest perhaps a final time, under a shared threat with the Cuban people we hardly knew. This was the birth of the new antiwar movement of the sixties, and the turning point in the New Left’s dissent from Cold War liberalism.
The protest against war with Cuba deepened a festering emotional and political divide between the New Left and the traditional liberal Democrats, then represented by Schlesinger’s Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which had led notable battles for civil rights legislation in prior years. Perhaps because they were instinctively anticommunist and pro-Kennedy, the ADA supported the administration’s Cuba policy; as the liberal White House aide told the demonstrators, “You have come to the wrong address. Go see Khrushchev,” completely misunderstanding why young Americans were protesting the role of our own government, not seeing that we were motivated by outraged patriotism. The ADA leader John Roche denounced the New Left in the New York Times as “morally bankrupt” adherents to an escapist “cult of survival,” meaning that we should accept our nuclear fate in the name of anticommunism. We who already were on the front lines of the violent South didn’t take the insult well. In interviews not long after, JFK himself would say he’d “rather my children be red than dead,” as if those absurdist choices were the only ones available.28 The late Jack Newfield, a Kennedy supporter and Village Voice writer, wrote back to Roche, “You have come to the wrong generation, go see your contemporaries.” It was not morally bankrupt, Newfield wrote, to “reject the Cold War’s institutionalized madness, and demand a cessation of nuclear testing, abandonment of provocative bases in Turkey, cutbacks in the arms budget and other unilateral initiatives toward disarmament.”
Just as it would polarize the once-monolithic communist world, the Cuban Revolution was causing a fundamental re-think among American liberals and the Left.
On one of those October nights, I remember being crammed into a local church listening to the great muckraking journalist I. F. Stone announce that all deadlines had passed and that missiles soon would be on their way. He, of course, was wrong, a lesson in caution about apocalyptic thinking that I would remember. It’s impossible to fully reconstruct my feelings at that moment all these decades later, but it was not paralyzing fear so much as a heightened alertness, an emotional calm as we waited for Armageddon to roll itself out. Inside the White House, Bobby Kennedy talked of the “end of mankind.”29 Outside in the streets, the same unforgettable feeling was shared with one difference: we on the outside could do little about it without a movement.
With nothing left to lose, I ate a cheeseburger with two friends at a local restaurant.
I had never felt the attack of vertigo, of things falling apart in my life, until that time, and nothing resembling the feeling since. Perhaps it fortified my tendencies toward existentialism instead of the more rational expectations that come with liberalism or Marxism. It may also have caused a numbing of emotion, at least after the cloud lifted and everyday life resumed. From then forward, I never quite accepted the five-minutes-to-midnight logo of the antinuclear movement, since I would learn that near-death experiences could be escaped, the clock could be stopped. Many people today experience similar fears and depression when facing the evidence that it’s “game over” due to climate change. They live permanently in the state of perpetual fear I experienced that October.
In that same issue of Common Sense, I published a several-thousand-word analysis with Dick Flacks in Ann Arbor, titled “Cuba and USA.” The most positive outcome of October, we said, was the rise of a large-scale peace force for the first time since the fifties. But we also experienced the presence of an awesome “war lobby” ready and willing to deploy nuclear weapons in a first strike. “There was nothing we could do in the midst of this crisis to avert its extension to holocaust.” Without making electoral politics “a fetish,” it was clear to us that “the priority today, as never before, is power,” the building of an institutional base capable of resisting the drift toward nuclear war.
That was a long time ago. There came exceptional films like Seven Days in May and Doctor Strangelove, and a few years later, peace candidates like George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert Kennedy. All these developments can be seen, at least in part, as responses to the polarizing fear that had taken hold during and after the Cuban missile crisis. Massive popular movements played roles in ending the wars in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and undermining the torturers who came to power in the Americas. Along the way, Cuba continued to be embargoed and subjected to attacks from Cuban exiles sheltered in Miami. But the US government never again sent American forces to invade or bomb Cuba. That was the result of the diplomatic agreements that ended the 1962 missile crisis, and one of the factors ensuring that this resulting “cold peace” would last was the certainty that thousands of Americans would take to the streets, along with people around the world, if our government tried to invade again. Over the decades, I have learned through experience that such ambiguous victories are worth ensuring.
Largely because of Cuba, today’s military doctrine of counterinsurgency gained full-fledged currency in the liberal Democratic Kennedy administration. The success of their ideological opponents in Havana inspired our leaders to want to be able to do what the Cuban insurgency had done. JFK’s inaugural address warned of a “long twilight struggle” against tyranny [i.e., communism], poverty, disease, and war itself. The clandestine Green Berets would carry it was seen as party the spear while the humanitarian Peace Corps would win hearts and minds. Our export of the Alliance for Progress would counter Cuba’s export of hemispheric revolution. Cuba, and soon South Vietnam, would be the testing grounds. The linkage was personified in Gen. Edward Lansdale who would bring a brash and unorthodox approach to campaigns against insurgencies in Vietnam and the Philippines. Lansdale argued for military action with a difference, that force could only succeed when there was a significant population that could be incited against left-wing revolutionary governments. “Winning hearts and minds” differed from a strictly humanitarian approach, however, by its integration into low-visibility military pressure—it was seen as part and parcel with a military campaign, not as an alternative to military involvement.30 Lansdale became RFK’s point man for the Cuba regime-change project.31 Lansdale was critical of the Bay of Pigs operation for having the illusion that there was popular support for overthrowing Castro on the island. Lansdale’s new strategy was summarized in an NSC memo that was later declassified: “Basically, the operation is to bring about the revolt of the Cuban people . . . [by] “economic warfare to induce failure of the Communist regime . . . psychological operations to turn the people’s resentment against the regime, and military-type groups to give the popular movement an action arm for sabotage and armed resistance. . . .”32 In Lansdale’s view, the “climactic moment” would come from an angry reaction “sparked by an incident or from a fracturing of the leadership cadre with the regime, or both. . . .” The Lansdale proposal covered the period between March and October 1962 and was officially terminated only after the October missile crisis, which clearly demonstrated the unity of the Cuban people behind Castro’s regime.
Lansdale wasn’t done in his search for new laboratories of counterinsurgency. After Cuba, he returned to South Vietnam to launch the Operation Phoenix, which included coercing the peasantry into “strategic hamlets” similar to the reservations of America’s nineteenth-century Indian wars. Lansdale died in 1987, becoming a legendary figure in a cult of counterinsurgency among younger officers. One of those Vietnam-era soldiers was David Petraeus, who reintroduced counterinsurgency as official doctrine in the 2006 Army-Marines Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The manual resurrects the legend of the Phoenix Program as a missed opportunity.33 Counterinsurgency, which failed in Cuba in its efforts “to turn the people’s resentment against the regime,” in the words of Lansdale’s report, continued on its path through Vietnam to the Iraq and Afghan wars of the twenty-first century. Even today, it is the key element of the US administration’s programs of “democracy promotion” and “regime change” aimed at Cuba and many other countries. The Bay of Pigs invasion was seen as a fiasco because it took place before an organized base of anticommunist discontent could be built on the island through outside “democracy promotion.” In Lansdale’s thinking, repeated endlessly since then, after the precipitating “incident,” which rationalized military intervention, there had to be Peace Corps-style economic development. The doctrine was recycled in the Bush Administration’s 2004 and 2006 high-level reports and the Clinton era’s Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws, all of which repeated Lansdale’s futile dream. In Afghanistan, decades later, the US strategy was to impose military suppression followed by delivering “democracy in a box.” Landsdale’s legacy couldn’t have been more wrong—in Cuba, in Vietnam, and in our later wars, as history has shown. Dead ideas never die.